2019 Best of the Best Winners: Website

Recognizing Marketing’s Finest

FORTY-SEVEN INDIVIDUAL MARKETING EFFORTS EARN AWARDS IN OUR 2019 CONTEST

Judging for tED magazine’s 2019 Best of the Best Marketing Awards Competition took place during April. Our four judges weighed the entries submitted for the contest’s 11 categories, which are separated by company type and sales volume. Ultimately, 47 entries were determined winners, with two companies—OneSource Distributors and Intermatic—taking home the honor of Best of the Best Overall Distributor and Best of the Best Overall Supplier, respectively. “Each year I am more impressed by the creativity we see in these entries,” said Best of the Best judge Jan Niehaus. “From top-of-the-line design to fresh and innovative ways to capture their customers’ attention, marketing in the electrical channel continues to impress.” Here we present all of this year’s winning submissions. Be sure to check out our monthly Best of the Best Awards coverage in this magazine’s “Selling” section for more insight into the winning entries.

WEBSITE /

Distributor Less Than $100M
Connexion
E-Commerce Website

In launching its e-commerce experience, Connexion focused on providing an easy-to-navigate, customer-friendly experience. Highlights include an innovative approach regarding how items are set up on the storefront (items are displayed in “product mode” rather than the traditional “SKU mode”), price and availability transparency, quick order lists, a customized checkout process, an Amazon-like search bar, and exclusive offers and outlet store.

FROM THE JUDGES: “Connexion truly built an online store with its new e-commerce site. It’s intuitive, easy to navigate, cleanly designed, customer-focused, and highly functional.”

Distributor $101M to $400M
State Electric Supply
New Website

State Electric Supply’s e-commerce website offers a live chat option, a user-friendly search function, and a clean design. It also features quick order, quote request, a reorder pad, and shopping lists along with account management functions including order and quote histories and e-invoices. Marketing efforts included efforts to increase SEO, consistent content creation, and social media ads.

FROM THE JUDGES: “State Electric Supply really worked to deliver the look and feel of a robust B2C site and it shows. Incredibly, visits increased from a few thousand a month to nearly 30,000 per month!”

Distributor $401M to $700M
Summit Electric Supply
Summit.com Feature Enhancements

To differentiate itself from the competition and make it easier to compete without the need to depend strictly on price, Summit introduced 108 new features to enhance product comparison visualization and improve the search function, customer account management, product data, and ease of ordering on its e-commerce site.

FROM THE JUDGES: “Summit says, ‘We put our customers first.’ And they don’t just say it; they really mean it. Every one of their sliders is about a customer benefit or a new feature…so they’re not just talking the talk; they are walking it.”

Supplier Less Than $250M
NICOR
Website Redesign

NICOR focused on creating a digital presence that not only is more in line with its ever-growing brand, but also raises the bar throughout the industry in use of technology and design/user experience standards. Additionally, the site is designed to allow NICOR to positionally prepare for future needs, upgrades, and implementations with efficiency and accuracy.

FROM THE JUDGES: “This site is head and shoulders above the competition. The redesign is cleaner and simpler with more robust product pages and a much more intuitive interface than its predecessor. It’s also very customer-friendly.”

Supplier More Than $250M
Legrand
Smart Lighting from the radiant Collection

To develop a website that would provide an online destination for media traffic to educate audiences on smart lighting, reinforce the advantages of using/installing Legrand smart lighting devices, provide a resource for electrical safety information, and create leads for the sales team, Legrand conducted 18 months of targeted research to identify key points in the sales journey where effort is high for the customer and where web pages could be used to alleviate that effort.

FROM THE JUDGES: “The site does a great job of incorporating multiple media; it is very interactive and intuitive and literally answers all your questions.”